In the production of disposable hypodermic syringes it is necessary to subject the syringe bodies to a series of treatments before filling them. They must be sterilized with hot water or air, dried, coated with silicone and so on. This is typically done by mounting the tubular syringe bodies in holders on the periphery of a rotor or carousel that is rotated in steps to move the objects through successive treatment stations.
Each of the treatment steps is normally relatively short compared to the time necessary to fit the objects to the seats or holders of the carousel and remove them therefrom. Therefore it is standard to form the periphery of the carousel as a sequence of straight tangentially extending sections each having a straight row of the object holders. Thus the loading and unloading devices can, with each step of the carousel, fit a batch comprised of a plurality of the objects to the carousel or remove the batch therefrom. In a standard arrangement there are twenty-four such sections each having five such holders so that the carousel is moved steps of 15.degree. and each time it is stopped five objects are stripped from one of the sections while immediately downstream from this unloading station at a loading station a loading device fits five objects to empty holders.
While such a system represents a substantial increase in throughput, the loading and unloading still represent a bottleneck in production, in that these steps are still the main factor limiting throughput.